The Enterprise Server Impact Of Intel/AMD Settlement Remains To Be Seen

As an infrastructure and operations professional, it’s hard not to like the terms of the settlement between Intel and AMD but the implications for your buying strategy and roadmap aren’t that clear yet. The rules of engagement spelled out in the Intel 8K make it clear that server vendors are free to select the CPUs that best fit their design goals and to carry as wide a portfolio of AMD-based servers as they feel the market demands. Server vendors can also market AMD to their heart’s content without fear of retribution from Intel (if the accusations from the past are true — something Intel isn’t admitting through this settlement). It also means that the two companies can stop aiming so many legal weapons at each other and redirect those funds and management brain cells to accelerating innovation. The $1.25B influx to AMD will be a very welcome shot in the R&D arm, too.
That’s all goodness that may lead to greater adoption of AMD-based servers in the future by enterprises. It doesn’t mean we can expect equivalency in performance or purpose between them, though. All it does is spell out the rules of engagement for fair play.

It also doesn’t ensure full compatibility between AMD and Intel processors and this is where one question in particular lies unanswered.

According to the 8K, Section 2.3 on Technical impairments:
“Intel shall not include any Artificial Performance Impairment in any Intel product…mean[ing] an affirmative engineering or design action by Intel (but not a failure to act) that (i) degrades the performance or operation of a Specified AMD product, (ii) is not a consequence of an Intel Product Benefit and (iii) is made intentionally to degrade the performance or operation of a Specified AMD Product. For purposes of this Section 2.3, “Product Benefit” shall mean any benefit, advantage, or improvement in terms of performance, operation, price, cost, manufacturability, reliability, compatibility, or ability to operate or enhance the operation of another product.”

The key word here is “compatibility.” Case in point: virtualization live migration. Intel VT, the set of instruction sets in the Xeon CPU family that helps with the performance of virtual infrastructures and enables live migrations from server to server are not compatible with AMD-V technologies that do the same thing (roughly). What this means today is that with Intel’s implementation you can’t live migrate from an Intel-based server to an AMD-based server. AMD-V actually lets you migrate from AMD to Intel, but you can’t move back. As a result of this you are probably building out your server virtualization pool today purely with Intel-based servers.

So here’s the question: “Is the incompatibility of virtual infrastructure implementations an Artificial Performance Impairment or simply different approaches to delivering Product Benefit?”

The Intel 8K then states:
“In no circumstances shall this Section 2.3 impose or be construed to impose any obligation on
Intel to (i) take any act that would provide a Product Benefit to any AMD or other non-Intel product,
either when such AMD or non-Intel product is used alone or in combination with any other product, (ii)optimize any products for Specified AMD Products, or (iii) provide any technical information, documents, or know how to AMD.”

Hmm. This seems to state that Intel is under no obligation to address this particular example if the resolution provides a Product Benefit to AMD. And it further states in that same “(i)” that such Product Benefit includes cases of the products being used in combination – which describes the case of Intel and AMD servers in a shared virtual pool. It further states that Intel doesn’t have to provide any technical information, documents or know how to AMD through which they could take the initiative themselves to solve this problem.

If AMD can’t penetrate any enterprise’s virtual server pool because the feature of live migration doesn’t work across server families, that would seem to me to be a serious Artificial Market Impairment. But does that fit the terms of the settlement that state Artificial Performance Impairment must be proven? Hmm.

This is just one example of the types of questions and scenarios Intel and AMD’s lawyers and technical experts will have to apply to this agreement. And answers to these types of questions will be imperative for enterprises to understand as they can have significant impacts on buying behavior. 

Until these types of scenarios are played out the impact of this settlement on enterprise buyers remains unsettled.

By James Staten

Check out James' research

You can follow James on  here

Glenn's Picks for the ITSM Fusion 09 Conference

I am off to the annual itSMF USA conference in Dallas TX, better known as Fusion 09. This is expected to be the biggest and best IT Servcie Management conference yet and the pinnacle of the itSMF USA organizations progress to date. I hope these predictions come true because I am an avid supporter of itSMF and its mission to promote service management excellence.

As one element of a new partnership between Forrester Research and itSMF USA, we will be holding one-on-one meetings between conference attendees and Forrester analysts. Both my delightful and brilliant colleague Evelyn Hubbert and I will be there and we look forward to one-on-one meetings with as many people we can fit in!

With all the wonderful sessions that will be happening at the conference, it is tough to pick favorites. Still, here are the sessions I hope to catch while I'm there.

Monday 21-Sep

7:00 AM – 8:00 AM
Ask the Expert - Service Strategy (522)
Majid Iqbal, Gartner
Majid may work for my competitor, but he is a good guy and is the main author of the Service Strategy book. Hear from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

8:15 AM - 9:40 AM
Keynote: BOOM! 7 Choices for Blowing the Doors off Business-as-Usual
Dr. Jackie Freiberg, Best-selling author and thought leader
I can't say I know Jackie, but her bio and the abstract for her session tell me this is going to be a good one!

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Are Your People Ready for Change? (350)
Troy DuMoulin, Pink Elephant
Change is coming and coming fast! Troy is a brilliant guy and should give a great presentation on this topic.

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM
The Right Stuff: Measuring IT Performance Using Business-Relevant Metrics (514)
Moderator: Evelyn Hubbert, Forrester
Scott Sorensen, Axios Systems
Corrine Seba, EMC
It’s all about the metrics! My colleague, Evelyn Hubbert, will moderate this panel of distinguished leaders. You don’t want to miss this!

2:15 PM - 3:15 PM
ITIL® Implementation: Qualitative Keys to Success (83)
Nancy Lee Hutchin, US Department of Transportation
This looks interesting. It’s always great to hear how someone else has “done it” and succeeded.

3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Keynote: VROOM! Running IT Like a Business
David Coyle, Gartner

5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Networking Reception & Exhibits (NETR1)
These are always good opportunities to network and see what the vendors have to offer.

7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
ITSM Tweetup
Many of the ITSM Twitterati will be meeting at the ITSM Tweetup at the Texan Station Sports Bar & Grille in the Gaylord Texan resort.

Tuesday 22-Sep

7:00 AM - 8:00 AM
Ask the Expert - Service Transition (524)
Ivor Macfarlane, Service Management Consultant & Evangelist,IBM
Ivor is wonderful! I always take advantage of the opportunity to see him present! He is always enlightening and always entertaining! Get up early to see this!

8:15 AM - 9:40 AM
Keynote: From Gloom and Doom to Bloom! The Power of Being Positively Contagious
Kirk Weisler, Chief Morale Officer and Master of Ceremonies
Kirk is one of those high-energy guys that can always inspire you to be more than you think you can be! He’s done this event for a few years and is always a huge hit!

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Teaming CobiT® and ITIL® for Improved Value and Service (209)
Robert Stroud, ITGI/CA
Rob is one of the top thinkers in our profession! You MUST attend this to hear some of the best pearls of wisdom to come out of this conference! Wrapping ITIL and Cobit into a more comprehensive body of knowledge about service management is a great thing to do. Learn how!

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM
The Need For Trust: Building a Trustworthy IT (10)
Ken Wendle, HP/itSMF Intl.
Trust is one of the biggest challenges IT faces and we all better address it soon or find ourselves in a terrible predicament. Ken, one of the original itSMF founders, is a delightful guy who also happens to be one of the finest minds in ITSM!

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Frameworks: Driving ITSM Beyond Operations (175)
Terri Richards, Intel
One of my favorite aspects of ITIL v3 is that is helps demolish the walls that imprison ITSM only within the Operations organization. A full lifecycle approach is needed for any complex system, IT included. I am eager to see what Intel has done here.

3:15 PM – 4:14 PM
Delivering Customer Value from Outsourcing Your Enterprise IT Services -- A Multi- Disciplinary Approach to Applying ITIL® (531)
Ashley Culbertson (Booz Allen Hamilton)
Jennifer Marie Parker (Booz Allen Hamilton)
Robert Whitkop (Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), Dept of the Navy)
I’m interested to hear how this situation worked out because targeted outsourcing is becoming a bigger element of many IT organizations and therefore, more ITSM efforts.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Top Process Improvement Lessons Learned at Largest Internet Companies (497)
Gene Kim, Tripwire
I really struggled with this time slot because Lawrence Sheets will also be presenting some great insight about how to align business drivers with ITSM. In the end, Gene won my preference because his presentations are always so informative and this topic is one that has some real merit. Internet companies have to do the same things we all must do. Their scale and genuine financial success are so heavily reliant on their ITSM maturity, however, that they are a good barometer for where the rest of the profession must go. If you want to know where you need to be in a few years, come see what these companies have already done.

5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Networking Reception & Exhibits (NETR2)
More opportunity to network and check out lots of vendor offerings, all in one sweep!

Wednesday 23-Sep

7:30 AM – 8:30 AM
Evolution & Development - ITIL® Evolution/Growth & Certification Scheme (529)
Sharon Taylor, President – Aspect Group & ITIL V3 Chief Examiner, Aspect Group
Richard Pharro, Director, APM GroupBody
Some exciting new developments are coming for professional development in the ITSM domain. I expect Sharon and Richard to shed some light on this. Sharon, by the way is the Queen of ITIL v3, it’s chief architect! She always has something great to convey to the masses.

8:45 AM – 9:45 AM
The Journey to Service Catalog: You CAN Get There From Here (248)
Michele Bonner, Austin Energy
A service catalog is one of the most important building blocks for more advanced ITSM maturity. I am hoping to learn a lot about how Michele and her team have built and leveraged their service catalog.

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Does IT Measure Anything Useful? (117)
Ivor Macfarlane, IBM
More ever-important metrics discussion from the great Ivor Macfarlane! I really don’t want to miss this!

12:15 PM – 1:45 PM
Keynote: Zoom! Carpe Diem: Moving Forward as Heroes of IT
Glenn O’Donnell, Forrester Research
Gee, I suppose I would be a bit remiss if I didn’t recommend my own keynote! I have a lot of important things to say, so I hope you can be there!

By Glenn O'Donnell

Check out Glenn's research

You should follow me on  here

Cloud DR Services Are Real

There is a lot of hype surrounding cloud and I'm usually not one to join the hype but in the case of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services (I'm trying to use the IT service continuity but it hasn't caught on yet), these service are available today and they address major pain points in IT operations and organizations of all sizes can leverage these services, not just small and medium businesses.

Storage-as-a-Service is relatively new. Today the main value proposition is as a cloud target for on-premise deployments of backup and archiving software. If you have a need to retain data for extended periods of time (1 year plus in most cases) tape is still the more cost effective option given it's low capital acquisition cost and removability. If you have long term data retention needs and you want to eliminate tape, that's where a cloud storage target comes in. Electronically vault that data to a storage-as-service provider who can store that data at cents per GB. You just can't beat the economies of scale these providers are able to achieve.

If you're a small business and you don't have the staff to implement and manage a backup solution or if you're an enterprise and you're looking for a PC backup or a remote office backup solution, I think it's worthwhile to compare the three year total cost of ownership of an on-premise solution versus backup-as-a-service.

If you lack a recovery data center or if you're looking for more a cost-effective solution for your Windows and Linux x86 server farms, I recommend that you evaluate new virtual recovery services. And for anyone who is about to renew their DR services contract, you should evaluate these new services before you resign for another three years of tape-based recovery to oversubscribed, shared IT hardware. These services fill the gap between DR services that rely on replication to dedicated IT hardware which are far too expensive for most organization and tape-based recovery to shared IT hardware, which while affordable, do not meet the recovery time and recovery point requirements of organizations from small to large and acoross industries.

And of course, if you're focused on the availability and recovery of email in particular, well there is a laundry list of service providers that focus cloud-based services for email from including continuity of service, recovery, archiving and if you wanted to, just move your email to the cloud period.

These services already have a toehold in the US but in order to expand into Canada and to Europe, these service providers are busily opening up data centers in these regions. In Canada and the EU, data privacy laws restrict the transfer of data containing personally identifiable information out of region or to a country that doesn't meet the standard of its own privacy laws.

Perhaps I'm too bullish on these services, perhaps organizations still have security concerns with cloud-based services but I think evey IT operations professional must now seriously consider these services when evaluating any backup or DR offering.

By Stephanie Balaouras

Check out Stephanie's research

You should follow me on  here

Green Storage Has Limited ROI, But Supports Overall Efficiency

I care deeply about the environment, certainly more than I care personally about money, so it pains me to say that in most cases, making storage decisions based on power expenditure alone is not rational behavior. The world is driven by economics, and the stark reality is that the cost of power is only a drop in the bucket compared to the amount organizations spend on acquiring and managing their enterprise storage systems. Maybe someday a consumption tax or cap and trade system will tip the balance towards more responsible consumption of non-renewable resources, but in the meantime, the pricing of power (especially in the US) doesn’t give much economic incentive for good behavior. In fact, according to a report Forrester published recently, the amount of money typically spent on electricity to power and cool a TB of storage is only about 1% of the cost of buying that TB of storage (or about 4% of the annualized cost of buying that storage given that you only have to buy the TB once every 3-5 years but you power it every year). So, unfortunately for the environment, power cost itself doesn’t provide a very strong incentive for storage efficiency.

Fortunately though, the things that enterprises can do to reduce their power consumption costs are often the exact same things they can do to reduce the capital and operating expenses of their overall storage environment. Focusing on improving utilization (measured as the quantity of data written divided by the quantity of storage on hand) and increased usage of dense drives are the most straightforward and effective ways to reduce hardware acquisition costs as well as power consumption. There are many ways to achieve these objectives such as thin provisioning, reporting and reclamation to improve utilization, and tiering or wide striping to enable more use of dense drives. Whatever the motivation — economic, altruistic, or a combination of both — organizations that put significant focus on their utilization and dense drive ratios are likely to spend less money and be greener at the same time. And that’s good for everybody.

By Andrew Reichman

Check out Andrew's research

Cisco's Big Blade Server Bet

After months of rumors, Cisco officially entered the server business this morning with a modular system it calls the "Unified Computing System" (UCS). This blade server system goes one step beyond its predecessors by starting from a unified network foundation on ten gigabit per second Ethernet (10 GbE) that delivers a true wire-once architecture. We believe this is the next step in blade server technology as it collapses a lot of components in these systems -- unified network, direct path I/O from the VM through to the chip, to the network, and unique system optimization for virtual workloads.

However, no one is clamoring for another server vendor, so despite the strong showing of partners at this launch, Cisco will have to win over enterprise server buyers who up to this point have had no relationship with the company. We think UCS will succeed mostly in green field deployments inside of companies who have a strong strategic partnership with Cisco. As they realize the gains promised, others will start to take them seriously.

As Cisco has affected the telephony market with its VoIP push, so too could they have the same affect on the server market over time, but it would be a mistake to discount HP and IBM who see this same vision and arguably are better positioned to take their strategic partner enterprise clients there.

By James Staten and Galen Schreck

Check out James' research and Galen's research.

Adaptive Infrastructure No Longer Just A Vision

At the beginning of this decade HP put forth a vision for the future data center that they have now fulfilled with both products and services offerings. Viewed by some at the time as a reaction to IBM Applications on Demand, HP coined Adaptive Infrastructure as its vision for a "composable" data center that let resources  be quickly and easily assigned to business services based on their needs and for IT Ops to achieve and maintain high utilization of their data center resources.

In 2008 HP started to fulfill this vision with the combination of its blade systems, Virtual Connect technology, Virtual Machine Management software, and the OpsWare-lite Insight Dynamics-VSE. It started customers down this path through HP Professional Services who debuted an Adaptive Infrastructure Maturity Model coupled with advisory and implementation services that plotted your course towards this reality. This month they added orchestration and recovery services to the Dynamics family and announced new AI Discovery centers, ProCurve software to enhance network orchestration, and enhanced services offerings to take advantage of these new portfolio elements. All these announcements add significant meat to Adaptive Infrastructure, which is one of the few visions you can actually implement today.

The timing is good for these announcements and for delivery against this vision as VMware, Cisco and others start to ratchet up their own marketing around a similar-sounding futureview.

Cisco debuted its Data Center 3.0 vision early last year with the introduction of its 10GbE Nexus products. It clearly sees the network convergence 10GbE will bring as a catalyst for its vision which speaks with a familiar ring about the orchestration and composability of resources. And with rumors spreading about a potential play on the server side, Cisco is garnering mindshare well ahead of its ability to deliver.

And last fall VMware launched its similar-sounding vision, Virtual Data Center OS. While VMware has yet to reach the market presence of HP or Cisco, it has the ear of many IT Ops leaders thanks to the IT consolidation and automation gains it has delivered to the market in the last four years. Its success has had such a strong effect that most vendors find themselves competing not with VMware's existing product line, but against their roadmap, as many of the IT best practices for virtualization implementation are being set by VMware.

While all these efforts at transforming the data center into a more responsive, highly utilized asset pool are commendable (and sorely needed), each carries a degree of proprietariness. Thus, IT Ops leaders need to ask: which vision should we follow and what tradeoffs do they carry with them?

In HP's case, you can't really deploy a heterogeneous Adaptive Infrastructure -- it runs on HP BladeSystem with Virtual Connect. You can use any hypervisor technology, any OS and can even incorporate your Integrity open systems into this model, but its capabilities quickly become limited off-platform.

Cisco's DC 3.0 obviously locks you into the Cisco networking products family. It will likely be best with VMware, based on their previous partnership announcements, and will likely attempt to commoditize the server and storage assets it orchestrates.

VMware's VDC-OS will clearly be a VMware-only (while it might incorporate other hypervisors) infrastructure play.

You'll be hard pressed to find any vendor's vision or strategy for IT modernization that is truly heterogeneous, so looking for that is a fool's quest. Instead look to your own standardization efforts. If you are standardizing on any of the above vendors, then you are likely to be inclined toward their vision and will be able to gain tremendously from what they bring forth.

If HP is your preferred systems vendor then you can have this vision now, which may be an important trump card if you are taking advantage of the recession by investing in transformation now so you can emerge stronger. Its one thing to have a compelling vision. It's another to be delivering it today.

By James Staten

Check out James' research

Enterprise Readiness Of Cloud Ratcheting Up

It may just be time for enterprise customers to take a serious look at cloud computing. Major announcements in the past few days from Microsoft and Amazon have certainly signaled that the on-demand Internet computing model has staying power. And with a long recession looming there may be no better time to start getting familiar with something that could dramatically lower infrastructure costs.

Amazon, which has been the dominant market leader and pioneer of cloud computing, finally lifted the "beta" tag from the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and delivered an SLA for the service and support for Windows applications. It also announced plans to provide service monitoring, load balancing and automatic scaling services in the future. And Amazon's even starting taking phone calls and providing premium support for enterprise customers. Nearly all of these capabilities have been available for months from smaller cloud players (especially those coming from an ISP background where such capabilities are commonplace).

Microsoft countered by signalling that cloud computing has such significant staying power that they are willing to bet the "Windows" brand on it. Ray Ozzie's Windows Azure goes beyond the basic infrastructure and services of EC2 providing Visual Studio.Net developers with the promise of a complete platform for their works. This will put Microsoft in competition with EC2 as well as Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. But Azure is just a technical preview today (aka "beta").

What these market makers have in common is massive data center footprints that allow them to support significant numbers of very large clients at huge scale and across geographies.

As Ray Ozzie put it during his keynote on Monday at Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference, it is becoming exceedingly difficult for enterprise infrastructure and developer teams to manage applications at web scale. The world where latency differences between New York City and Columbus, Ohio can cost you customer loyalty and millions in revenue, getting web scale right is increasingly important and the infrastructure and operations professionals who have these skills and experience using them are becoming harder and harder to find. Cloud computing platforms from the Web Giants don't eliminate this problem but they certainly can ease the burden considerably, and when doing it yourself means large capital investments, the appeal of a platform that delivers some degree of this on its own becomes very appealing. 

Its quickly becoming quite clear that cloud computing isn't a passing fancy but is indeed a new computing paradigm worthy of your attention. The questions about cloud computing now shift to what percent of your application portfolio is it suited to and how easy is it consume. Most infrastucture clouds are built on a hypervisor foundation (although not VMware ESX) so any application that behaves well in a hypervisor should be suited to these clouds, but which of these need the scalability of a cloud platform or works best in a hosted environment? Most clouds are also designed to appeal to developers - not infrastructure managers - and ask I&O pros to use different tools and metaphors to get their job done.

The enterprises that are tapping into clouds today are doing so with web microsites, internal-facing projects, and  other fairly safe experiments. Most of this activity falls into the "toe in the water" variety. Further experimentation is needed for enterprises to gain comfort with this new model and these new services. If your company isn't playing around with cloud computing platforms today, you run the risk of falling behind. Windows Azure is a significant statement of staying power for cloud computing. It's time to shift your thinking from if you will use cloud computing to when.

By James Staten

Check out James' research

Cloud Courting: Round 1

VMware and Citrix want to be your cloud infrastructure provider. The competing virtual infrastructure makers announced dueling cloud initiatives this week aimed at providing xSPs with simple to deploy and buy cloud computing platforms that come from very different angles and may serve to bifurcate the mid to small market service provider space.

Citrix Cloud Center (abbreviated as C3, a nice homage to cloud pioneer Amazon Web Services' S3 cloud service) gives xSPs a portfolio of tools for automating virtual machine deployment, movement, and SLA management. It bundles together their XenServer Virtual Infrastructure, Netscaler application switch, WANScaler access gateway and bandwidth optimizer, and the forthcoming Workflow Studio for application self-provisioning and admin orchestration.

Since most of the public clouds today are based on the Xen hypervisor, this solution should be a fairly complimentary deployment for those xSPs looking to add a cloud service to their portfolio or to enhance an existing basic cloud offering. Citrix is also wisely offering the solution on a consumption basis, rather than up front licensing fees, and is offering revenue sharing for xSPs that resell the suite to customers for their internal use. This suite of tools should be appealing to xSPs in that many are already Netscaler customers and have experienced the improvements it can deliver. The challenge will be getting them to move to a commercial management and provisioning platform. Many service providers have already built their own tools for these purposes or have set processes. Citrix will have to show these partners that their tools deliver greater efficiency and predictability. There's nothing cloud- or xSP-specific in this offering yet but Citrix is taking a listening approach with this offering and knows strategically that the cloud market is its to lose, give its Xen-centric foundation.

VMware is courting clouds from its position of strength –- the enterprise. It knows that the next wave of growth in cloud computing must be with enterprise customers and they are building their virtual infrastructures on VMware. Enterprises are skeptical that public clouds can deliver the security, availability and compatibility with their existing application portfolios they need and are thus inclined to build internal clouds first and to do it with their incumbent hypervisor technology. But infrastructure & operations professionals know they won't be able to offer internal clouds that can deliver large scale if needed and thus would like to ability to flex these clouds up to a xSP partner when they need to. They just want this flexing to look like and behave like the resources they already have under management -- thus the opportunity for VMware vCloud.

At the VMworld show, CEO Paul Maritz said that VMware already has over 100 xSPs signed on for this initiative including big names like Savvis, British Telecom, Verizon, SunGard and T-Systems. But these aren't the big names in cloud computing today and simply signing up for this initiative may be more an issue of being a good partner with VMware rather than a solid commitment to the program.

No doubt VMware's value proposition to enterprise customers is spot on but xSPs work on thin margins, and aren't inclined to pay for software. And with the first open standard for virtual machines, OVF being ratified this week, a credible case for hypervisor agnosticity can be made by Citrix and existing non-VMware clouds, like Amazon EC2. That said, xSPs want to deliver what their customers ask for and they are asking for (and getting) VMware today for persistent virtual hosting.

The value propositions being put forth by these two competitors appeal to different sides of the cloud equation and could end up being two classes of service offered by the xSP community. Citrix could strengthen its offering by adding XenApp and XenDesktop services which have strong enterprise traction or may be natural enterprise opportunities for C3.

Neither company's effort is a finished product, or even ready for production deployment, so it's just a courting exercise today, much like IBM's Blue Cloud. Microsoft, RedHat, Novell and other players with a dog in this fight are yet to enter the fray publically and could disrupt or overshadow these value propositions. But at this stage xSPs have no shortage of choices and soon, neither will you.

By James Staten

Check out James' research

IBM's Play In Cloud Computing? Listening Carefully

IBM's PR engine has been ratcheting up the volume about its efforts in cloud computing lately and if you are like me, I found their press releases confusing, so I got them on the phone to try and get past the hype to better understand what they are really doing in this space. Turns out they have turned on a powerful listening and learning engine.

IBM’s BlueCloud initiative isn't (at least not initially) an attempt to become a cloud services provider or to become a cloud computing platform, but rather to help their customers experiment with, try out, and custom design cloud solutions to fit their needs. Building off the IBM Innovation Center concept, IBM is providing Cloud centers that are places customers from enterprise and government accounts, as well as non-IBM customers can test out cloud computing concepts, mostly for deployment internal to their own data centers. Gerrit Huizenga, the technical solutions architect for BlueCloud for IBM's Systems & Technology Group (STG) said these efforts are helping them build out a series of cloud blueprints, or proven/standardized cloud infrastructures. "Our goal is to deliver solutions that make it much easier to deploy and manage these things," Huizenga said.

Another goal is to feed their various product roadmaps as well, allowing Tivoli, WebSphere and STG products to adapt to these new infrastructures and get ahead of the competition (and they have some early software products and solutions in this area too).

In the process, IBM is discovering and enabling interesting new business models and concepts that cloud computing makes possible. For example, the Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited, a developer of business parks in Wuxi China wanted to quickly enable its tenants to jump into the software market without having to buy and rack servers, so it built a centralized cloud center for all the tenants to share. If successful this could be a repeatable model for other office park developers in emerging markets.

The Reservoir project in Europe is another business model experiment of note that IBM is helping to build out. It asks the question: could a public cloud service like Amazon EC2 be democratized and provided as a public service to drive collaboration and fuel cross European commerce. Could this be Internet 3.0?

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of IBM’s investigations -- at least for enterprises infrastructure and operations professionals -- is their research into how public clouds can become extensions of private, corporate clouds when demand requires it, allowing true scale-on-demand. IBM has taken several attempts at providing capacity on demand, none of which have truly met the mark. A concerted listening and learning effort could yield a much more effective solution this time around. And it's the infrastructure foundations of cloud computing -- virtualization, abstraction, and workload management -- that may just make this version stick.

If you are an IBM customer with the desire to either build an internal cloud that uniquely fuels your business' needs or want to help shape the public cloud of the future, you may benefit from collaborating with IBM’s BlueCloud team. Your learnings could determine what these new infrastructures will look like, providing your business with early-mover advantage.

By James Staten

Check out James' research

Cloud Maturity Is Accelerating: More Than Just Reaction To The Hype?

Over the past few months a flurry of announcements have begun swirling around the cloud computing space, which remains a nascent market in the overall IT realm. Do these announcements portend a fast maturity for the concept or just the typical "me too" that comes with a hyped market?

In June, RightScale, a cloud management software and consulting company that has become a bit of a poster child as a cloud integrator, announced a partnership with GigaSpaces that integrates their eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) clustering and cache solution with the RightScale automated cloud management platform for Amazon EC2 clients. The value of this partnership comes from the fact that EC2 simply provides you with a VM you can populate but no availability or scalability services. XAP is a cluster architecture that delivers these values and can be quickly and easily deployed via the RightScale tool.

Next came Elastra, a San Francisco startup building a Cloud Server, a middleware layer that turns a commodity infrastructure into a cloud (similar value to what 3Tera provides today). The first iteration deploys similarly to XAP -- as a software layer you load into EC2 VMs, that enables scale and availability to the apps you lay on top of it.

Hyperic followed with the introduction of CloudStatus the first performance monitoring tool for clouds (starting with EC2, naturally). If the cloud computing market takes off, Hyperic could become the Keynote Systems of the cloud market. Skytap, Kaavo, GoGrid, CogHead, DabbleDB, and myriad others have since entered the cloud space as well.

These announcements all start to address some of the shortcomings of cloud computing: predictability, availability and scale. We are also starting to see clouds that go well beyond the bare bones infrastructure for hire of EC2. Google App Engines and salesforce.com both provide a series of infrastructure, availability, monitoring, scaling and other services capabilities that can be tapped into as a platform -- while imposing some restrictions on application design and portability.

Even academia is starting to look at clouds as a potential way to accelerate research projects and control the escalating supercomputer center wars. Kate Keahey, a fellow in the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago is using rPath's virtual appliance technology to help researchers quickly package applications for deployment onto the Lab's HPC cloud, other academic clouds and quickly create an HPC cluster on EC2 and deploy it there. "I believe that this will be the model of the future. Providers who can provide their resources as a cloud on a long-term basis will create the conditions for easy migration to commercial platforms for overflow," she said, "This will absolutely drive cost savings for the universities."

While there are plenty of other excuses holding back enterprise IT shops from tapping into the cloud, such as security concerns and a dearth of Windows support, the progress is encouraging. And since we published our first report on the topic, the level of interest in tapping clouds or endorsing cloud access for application developers has risen considerably among infrastructure & operations professionals. It's still early days and we certainly aren't seeing the type of enterprise implementations we would expect to signal a high growth phase, but it's starting to look like cloud computing may have greater legs than the utility computing efforts that came before it. Are you tapping the clouds? Tell us about your experiences.

By James Staten

Check out James' research